That a profound truth--a truth that is, indeed, the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsibility--is involved in this characteristic of the sacred narrative, I am not alone persuaded, but distinctly aware. This, hovever, does not preclude us from seeing, nay, as an additional mark of the wisdom that inspired the sacred historian, it rather supplies a motive to us, impels and authorizes us, to see, in the form of the vehicle of the truth, an accommodation to the then childhood of the human race. Under this impression we may, I trust, safely consider the narration,--introduced, as it is here introduced, for the purpose of explaining a mere work of the unaided mind of man by comparison,--as an [Greek (transliterated): eros hierogluphikon],--and as such (apparently, I mean, not actually) a 'synthesis' of poesy and philosophy, characteristic of the childhood of nations. In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a _philosophema_ [Greek (transliterated): tautaegorikon], --the tree of knowledge of good and evil,--an allegory, a [Greek (transliterated): propaideuma], though the noblest and the most pregnant of its kind. The generation of the [Greek (transliterated): nous], or pure reason in man. 1. It was superadded or infused, 'a supra' to mark that it was no mere evolution of the animal basis;--that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed: 2. The [Greek: nous], or fire, was 'stolen,'--to mark its 'helero'--or rather its 'allo'-geneity, that is, its diversity, its difference in kind, from the faculties which are common to man with the nobler animals: 3. And stolen 'from Heaven,'--to mark its superiority in kind, as well as its essential diversity: 4. And it was a 'spark,'--to mark that it is not subject to any modifying reaction from that on which it immediately acts; that it suffers no change, and receives no accession, from the inferior, but multiplies it-self by conversion, without being alloyed by, or amalgamated with, that which it potentiates, ennobles, and transmutes: